(Re)Discovering Myself Through Prose

My Blog is Not Dead! (Updates in Life)

My blog is not dead! For the past month, I have been just trying to find a consistent place where I can access WordPress without killing my data plan. Virtual life in Burma has been super difficult to maintain but I’ve found a place where I can now humbly continue sharing my experiences here in Burma, and it’s at my Work!!

Yes it’s my first job ever and I’m very excited about that! I’m now the SAT Instructor at the Kaplan branch in my home city of Yangon (it started around March 2016, so you see, we Burmese people are developing!) and they’ve been looking for someone to tutor the SAT and voila! I’ve just recently completed my degree and I’m very eager to see where this part of my life will go. I’m very happy with this job because it will provide me with honest labor and it will be an opportunity for me to share with my experiences and hopefully through my work, I can empower students to think for themselves and for them to experience university life abroad!!

Moving onward, I will now have another sector of my blog now, reflections on teaching! Part of this includes how our language structures are different and how this leads to impediments in learning English (in fancy linguistic terms, this is called ‘transference’), and we can easily see this in differences in grammar and phonology, for example.

I also want to share with you that I’m doing a volunteer research position for Myanmar Women’s Self-Defense Center! The NGO is doing a survey on sexual harassment in my city of Yangon and we’re trying to see how demographic variables, such as age, gender, socioeconomic background, and township (districts in Yangon are named ‘townships’; this is a colonial legacy) affect experiences of sexual harassment (“I have been raped in the past two years” or “Someone has touched me without my consent”) and perceptions of sexual harassment (“I fully understand the difference between rape and consent” or “I am aware that I can say ‘no’ at any point in a sexual encounter”). I think this type of research is very important because we Burmese tend to stigmatize sex, especially if women are participating in the discourse of sex, from the familial level to the cultural, and this survey will set a precedence to encouraging women to talk freely about their experiences.

So long story short, I’m very happy with where I am at this point in life! Cheers everyone!